Birthday Bonfire

For Roan's 3rd birthday we had a bonfire in our backyard. I have no love for baking, and roasting marshmellows for s'mores seemed like the best way to get our guests to make their own dessert. I gave everyone fair warning, stating in the invitations that there would be an open flame and we'd be giving beer to the parents and sharp sticks to the kids. Incredibly, everyone still came.

Here's the scene: We strung lights and fired up the pit, and on the far left you can make out Grandpa Lyons, hunched over the s'more ingredients. He was extremely protective of the chocolate, as one pregnant mother complained, and would not allow for extra portions, even for those who were "eating for two." He neatly laid out the graham crackers under the chocolate squares, so when kids approached with their skewered marshmellows burned to a blackened crisp, he quickly assembled their s'mores, confiscated their sharp sticks, and sent them on their way.

Birthday guests sitting around the fire, in various stages of s'more preparation and consumption, or just keeping warm.

Here is Roan roasting a marshmellow. He consumed at least three s'mores that evening - possibly more. In the background you can see Grandma Lyons eating a s'more - her first ever! I only learned this later, and had I known, I would have given her an expertly browned marshmellow, and not one that Grandpa Lyons burned to a crisp for her.

Eventually the kids lost interest in the fire and the s'mores, and started chasing each other around the yard. This is generally what kids do after they eat.

And this is what adults do.

The party was a blast, but hosting so many people is hard on everyone, even Roan. For the first 20 minutes he sat on his Daddy's lap, clutching Gordon and his coal car tight in his fist, miserably watching his friends play with his trains. He got over it, and cheered up considerably when everyone trooped upstairs to eat pizza. By the time Jay lit the fire he was ecstatic.

Since the party we have been slowly opening gifts, one each day or so, so Roan has a chance to play with and appreciate each new thing. Thanks to all our family and friends who made Roan's 3rd birthday feel so special!

Halloween

This year, just like last year, we were trains. Roan was a Thomas-ish train, I was a red caboose, and Jay was Sir Topham Hatt. You probably can't tell, but Jay has a pillow under his coat, in an attempt to look fat. You also cannot tell I am 8 months pregnant, which makes this cardboard red caboose the most flattering thing I own.

Here we are, all the trains, minus Sir Topham Hatt, and plus Eli, who was a chef.

In this photo you can see Roan's small purple felt Halloween candy holder. It wasn't ideal for trick-or-treating, because of the wide top, which caused all of his candy to fall out when he ran. He didn't notice, and when we told him, he said, "I will puff more carefully," but would inevitably break into a run.

This was one reason why we went home with so little candy. Roan's total take was 2 mini twix, 1 snickers, and 2 lousy peppermints. The other reason was that Roan missed the point of trick-or-treating. He would walk up the stoop with his friends, say trick-or-treat just like everyone else, but when someone offered to put candy in his bag he would say, "no thank you, I already have some," and dutifully march back down the stairs.

A Quiet Moment

Dear Roan,

On Saturday we had a rare and beautiful quiet moment. Quiet moments with you are pretty much nonexistent. You are either extremely physically active, very (loudly) focused on some task, or dead asleep. You really don't spend much time loafing around.

It poured rain Saturday morning, the kind of rain where you only have to step outside for half a minute, or run from your apartment to your car, and you're drenched. It was so windy that umbrellas were useless. We drove an hour out to Long Island, to go to a birthday party for Mia and Taj. We'd only been in the car for 15 minutes when the rain turned to ice, and then snow. Snow in October!

After the party, Thunder McQueen had a nice layer of snow / slush. The tops of awnings, roofs, signs, were all white with it. And it kept coming, that wintry mix. By the time we got back to Brooklyn the roads were slush and the tree branches were bowed over with the weight of two inches of snow, bent over the roads in a low lying canopy. It was like driving through a tunnel of trees. It felt magical and it took me a while to realize why I'd never experienced this: it never snows here so early, and when it does snow, the trees are all bare, without the weight of their leaves to bend them low. The next day we would be warned to stay out of parks, away from the trees, whose branches would be snapping off all over the city.

You fell asleep in the car and you woke up groggy and tired. All three of us dried off and got in bed. You laid right on top of me, draped over my belly with your head on my chest. For a long time, maybe 15 minutes, nobody moved or talked. I thought maybe you'd fallen asleep, but you were just relaxing, staring into space. It was some quality family quiet time. We cuddled and watched the snow fall in our yard. Then Fred ruined the moment with some kicking and squirming and I told you how to feel for the baby. Then you said you wanted to "wash" something, which is what you say when you want to watch TV, and you and Daddy got in a fight over whether to "wash" soccer or some dinosaur show with terrible child acting.

As I've gotten older and increasingly pregnant, I've had to recalibrate my idea of a wonderful moment. They all used to involve a lot of action and some degree of chaos. Racing down the hill with you, watching your sneakers kick up puffs of fall leaves, hearing your wild laughter, it's still a damn good moment, but running anywhere at this point, with 30 extra pounds and no clear view of my own feet is unpleasant.

15 minutes of quiet inactive togetherness? Heaven.

Staten Island Ferry

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

October is holiday season for Jews. There are the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But then, after those, comes the best holiday of all: Sukkot!

Sukkot is 8 days long. During that time, you build a fort, or sukkah, and you live in it. Amazing! One of the things I've held onto from childhood is an undying love for building forts. When I heard about Sukkot I thought, "finally, here is a holiday that rivals Christmas!"

Of course, most regular Jews don't move into their sukkahs, they just eat some meals in them. And like everything else in Judaism, there are a lot of contradictory rules about how to make one. I decided to keep things cheap and simple and build a PVC pipe sukkah with tarp walls and thin wooden slats for an open roof.

This wasn't my first sukkah. Last year I became totally obsessed with building a sukkah the day before Sukkot, and went on a frantic 6AM trip to Lowe's to buy materials. I bought PVC pipes and a hacksaw, but they didn't have the right joinery. So I improvised with some spare parts I found in plumbing. That ended up being a mistake.

Another mistake: trying to build the sukkah by myself. To be fair, I wasn't totally alone, I had Roan to "help" me. I'd bought buckets and sand to anchor the vertical pipes, only they kept toppling over before I could get the joinery and horizontal pipes attached, because a certain toddler kept shoveling out all the sand. I finally got it up, hung blankets for walls, and was so excited that I called all my friends to come over and celebrate. They did, bless their hearts, and the damn thing collapsed in the first mild breeze, with 4 toddlers inside.

R.I.P. sukkah 2010. You only lived 3 short hours, but you taught me a lot. After two more trips to competing hardware stores I finally ordered the correct joinery online and retired the sukkah materials until 2011.

And now Sukkot has come again! With Jay's help and all the right hardware, we built our fort in less than 2 hours. Then we decorated it with white Christmas lights. I waited a full 24 hours to make sure it was stable before planning a Sukkot party.

5 kids from Roan's preschool came over to celebrate. It was raining so we had to eat inside, but after dinner the rain stopped so the adults sat in the sukkah and kids chased each other around the yard in circles, only coming into the fort when they had an injury. When hosting a party, it is sometimes hard to sit down, have a beer, and truly relax. Yet I did just that in the sukkah, at full dark with the lights blazing and kids running all around, screaming with laughter. It felt like we were in the eye of a storm. I took a moment to bask in my accomplishments: the sukkah was stable, my son was happy, nobody needed anything from the kitchen. I was living the good life.

I didn't take any pictures that night. But here are some shots of the sukkah in daylight, with two of the walls rolled up:

Daddy Race

Texas Trains

Last weekend we flew to San Antonio to visit Grandma and Grandpa Lyons, Auntie Lisha, Uncle Damon, and Cassie. We visited the Texas Transportation Museum, which is primarily devoted to trains.

There are steam engines, diesel trains, and a some assorted stock cars, flat cars, two cabooses, and two coaches that are decked out in 1920s splendor.

I took this picture in an attempt to record the temperature, which was about 95 degrees. On October 1st.

There were also model trains indoors, similar to the kind my father has. I have a theory that was confirmed on our trip to the Texas Transportation Museum. There are two kinds of people who are obsessed with trains: little boys, and old men. Anyone else at a train museum is there on behalf of a little boy or an old man.

When it was time to go, Grandpa Lyons bought you this engineer hat: